Enterprise Package Management for Everyone

Suppose you asked developers in the mid-2000s how they managed and compiled their binaries. You’d probably hear some anxiety-inducing answers (e.g., storing packages in git repositories or insecure file stores).

Thankfully, organizations currently have various options for managing their first or third-party packages, dependencies, and containers. Different tools offer different levels of package support and feature sets to improve your DevOps workflows, allowing organizations to decide based on the right mix of features to meet their needs. 

As part of our normal community pulse check, we polled 200 software developers, engineers, and DevOps professionals in July of 2022 to see what tools they’re using to manage their binaries and compiled source code. Here are two critical takeaways we found. 

1. JFrog takes the lead for enterprise organizations: For Enterprise sized organizations, JFrog Artifactory was the clear leading choice for both package management and container registry, as shown in the diagrams below, with 56% and 29% respectively choosing JFrog (compared to 16% and 19% for the following popular options).
   
2. SMBs use a variety of options to meet their needs: For package management, JFrog was still the favored option with 26% as seen in the diagrams below. But the distribution between used tools was much closer, with the following most popular choices having ~19% and ~14%. For container registry, JFrog came in second to AWS with 38% and 14%, respectively.

So while JFrog is the clear choice for enterprises to manage their packages and containers, smaller organizations are using a greater variety of options to meet their needs. 

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You don’t have to be an enterprise to get enterprise-grade quality

Enterprise-grade package management isn’t just for enterprises. 

There’s a common sentiment that you need to sacrifice when you’re at a smaller organization—either going without or selecting tools that may give more breadth of features but sacrificing the depth and completeness of those features. 

Here are just a few examples of how Artifactory can benefit smaller organizations immediately:

Improving build speed: Artifactory serves as a proxy to cache binaries from public registries to reduce latency and eliminate the possibility that a public registry is down or packages are unavailable. 

Increasing stability of CI/CD: Manage the inputs and outputs of your CI/CD pipelines in a single place that is stable, manageable, scales, and provides necessary metadata about your builds and artifacts. 

Production-ready: Serve production-ready assets to dynamic production environments from an always available, secure source. Artifactory is Kubernetes ready, providing a comprehensive, advanced container registry and Helm Chart repositories. 

And as you look to the future, here are a few ways in which adopting Artifactory lays the foundation for a constantly evolving world:

Truly Universal: The technologies you use today may not be the ones you need tomorrow. No other package manager natively supports as many package and file types as JFrog Artifactory (i.e., local, remote, virtual, HA, and replication). Nor do they offer the breadth of ecosystem support, easily integrating with the build and deployment tools you need to create and deliver software.

Cloud Flexibility: You can get started with Artifactory as an SaaS subscription in a matter of minutes, but as you grow, you might need to manage your binaries on-prem. Or you may want the freedom to take advantage of multiple public cloud providers. 

Artifactory delivers hybrid and multi-cloud DevOps support with the same great experience. DevOps teams have unparalleled flexibility in where they host, build, and deploy. No other repository manager provides this level of freedom to create where and how you want to.

Limitless Scale:  With JFrog Artifactory as part of the JFrog DevOps Platform, you can access and deliver your software components anywhere with total control. Set up multiple connected instances of Artifactory and leverage JFrog Distribution and Connect to ensure seamless software delivery to the edge. 

Holistic Security: Start with basic OSS and Container vulnerability scanning. As your security needs evolve, add advanced application security capabilities without needing to add a new solution. With Artifactory as your package manager and container registry, you can quickly turn on security through Software Composition Analysis (SCA) that has been thoughtfully integrated into the binary lifecycle management process – from curation through creation to consumption – securing and managing your software assets in a single place.

By choosing JFrog for package management, you lay a trusted foundation for scalable, flexible, and future-proof DevOps. You get essential capabilities today and efficiently meet the changing needs of your organization tomorrow without needing to replace the core element of your DevOps process.

But don’t take our word for it. Try Artifactory for yourself and see how package management with JFrog can benefit your organization.